![]() ![]() Similarly, there was no required training for the nurses who volunteered in war hospitals so most of their training happened on the job, too. Although both Union and Confederate military medical departments preferred using men in war hospitals, the need for more nurses became obvious in the first few months of the war. To become a doctor, “the only requirement was an apprenticeship with a doctor and some courses.” Many of the people who volunteered as surgeons during the Civil War essentially learned to operate on the job. “Surgery was not part of medical training for many people,” he says. When the Civil War began in 1861, medical jobs weren’t yet professionalized as they are today, says Stanley Burns, a surgeon, historian and founder of The Burns Archive. ![]() ![]() After the war, women continued to work in medicine and by 1900, they represented 91 percent of U.S. Amid this desperate need for medical workers, women began to volunteer as nurses for wounded soldiers. If a bullet didn’t kill a soldier, the infection that developed from a wound might and the infectious diseases that spread in war hospitals ravaged soldiers and medical workers alike. Of the estimated 620,000 military deaths during the Civil War, about two-thirds were due to disease. But the war created a medical crisis that demanded more volunteers, and a lot of the people who took up the call were women. Before the American Civil War, the majority of hospital nurses-or “stewards”-were men. ![]()
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